THE LATE M. ROYER COLLARD.-The follow- | most opposite; the morning saw him neglected ing tribute to the memory of the late M. Royer Collard is ascribed to the pen of M. Guizot.

and insulted by those whom the evening before he had protected and succored. But nothing could shake him; he was ever consistent with himself, armed as he always was with moderation and with principle. A sound Christian education had prepared M. Royer Collard for all positions; thus was he not taken unawares, when, in 1811, M. de Fontaines, charged with the organization of the university, named him dean of the faculty of letters, and professor of philosophy to the faculty, whose courses were attended by the normal school. The choice was at once sanctioned by all the ablest and best men of the day. M. Royer Collard, during the two years of his professorship, with the double authority of conscience and of reason, began an attack upon the sensualist system of the last age; with him com menced the renovation which was accomplished afterwards, and with so much brilliancy, under another master. Some portions of this course have been published; and in considering the language, at once copious and severe, alike admi

France has just lost, in M. Royer Collard, a great citizen, an illustrious orator, a severe writer, a profound thinker, and, above all, an honest man. The termination of noble lives, however long and well spent, always strikes us with a shock, as if it were unexpected. We feel that it ought not to be, and we cannot restrain ourselves from contemplating bitterly the void left by the lo-s of such men. The memory of their deeds, the authority of their words, assume then a more solemn character. The country receives the bequest with a feeling of piety, and the instructive example of such lives mingles with unanimous expressions of sympathy and of regret. Born at Sompuis, near Vitry-le-Francais, in 1763, M. Royer Collard died the 4th of September, at his residence, Chateauvieux, in Berry, in the 83d year of his age. Few public men have ever preserved, throughout so long a career, such persevering and complete consistency of principle. In that especially consists his glory. From the ear-rable for depth and clearness, in which these fine liest days of the revolution of 1789 to the end of lessons are conveyed, we think we hear an echo his life, M. Royer Collard remained faithful to from the solitudes of Port Royal. By his firmthe same view, devoted to the same convictions. ness of soul, by his studies, by his religious faith That which he desired in the first struggles of his and private virtues, M. Royer Collard was of that youth, at the commune of Paris, of which he was a school and of that time. Having adorned so immember, until the 10th of August, and then at the portant a chair, he was called by the restoration Council of the Five Hundred, where he sat for the to fill high administrative functions, and remained department of the Marne, he proclaimed with all charged until 1819 with the direction of national his might under the empire, and again under the education. In this elevated post, to which he restoration; and that whether he was on the side was so well adapted, and where he has left such of the government, or whether he was in opposi-worthy successors among his friends and disciples, tion and amidst those rough combats which a power whose fall was prepared by its faults, obliged him to encounter. The conciliation of order with liberty, of rights with duties, the establishment of constitutional monarchy upon the ruins of the ancient régime, alike removed from Royal despotism and popular anarchy-such were at all periods, in all situations, alike in success or in defeat, the aim, the object, the public passion of this firm and convinced soul. Faction of all kinds he looked upon with the horror of a good citizen, and for all excess he felt the contempt of a wise man. He defended the liberties of his country, after having labored long to restore the throne; he combated intriguing fanaticism with the same energy he had displayed in sustaining the rights of religion. Tyranny, in no matter what shape, found him an adversary. It is on that account that the ungrateful restoration struck him, as the Directory had struck him before He was exposed to hostilities from quarters the

he maintained powerfully the rights of the university against passions then alive and imperious. The university never forgot that service, and today she claims, as of right, her identification with this noble memory. But it was especially as a political man, engaged in the parliamentary struggles of this period, that Royer Collard assured for his name enduring lustre, and a power which each day renews and enlarges. We know how for fifteen years, separating respectfully the Crown from the intrigues of a faction, and clinging to the sanctuary of public liberties with the fervor of an apostle, he contributed by the influence of his overwhelming eloquence to the securing of the constitutional régime, to the propagation of sound liberal doctrines, and to the defence of new interests of order and of civilization. During this long period he was one of the truest interpreters of the public conscience, as well as its most eloquent organ. Each speech of his directed its ardor and hastened its advance

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES.
Great Britain.

ment. M. Royer Collard combated the law of election, the rights of primogeniture, the law of sacrilege, the laws violating the liberty of the press. It was thus that he secured for himself, The Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson, the instead of an unworthy popularity, a large hold American Ornithologist. With Portrait, Vig. upon the opinion of the country. This was made nette, &c. Pp. 504. Belfast: John Henderson. evident in the most striking manner the day when Alexander Wilson was one of those men, who, seven electoral colleges returned him at the same if not exclusively confined to Scotland, are much time-an honor to which his nomination to the more frequently found in that soul-ripening clime presidency of the Chamber seemed hardly to add than in any other land. Though a few years He bore with him to the tribune all the gravity younger, he was, as a poet, contemporary with of his mind, all the vigor of his character. Even Burns, and had composed The Pack, Watty and secondary and transitory questions rose in his Meg, and all his other celebrated Scottish pieces, hands to those high regions of philosophy and of and prophesied the utter decline of poetry, shortly morality to which his mind was habituated, and before Campbell, Rogers, Scott, Byron, Southey, from which it derived its inspiration. No orator Coleridge, Professor Wilson, Hogg, Wordsworth, had a higher idea of the dignity which is suitable and Moore, the bright poetic galaxy of the first to the language of a public man in a free country. years of the century, had appeared. AlexanHe knew what effects would flow, sooner or der Wilson was born in Paisley in 1766. His palater, from such example, and therefore did he rents were respectable persons, in comfortable, seek rather conviction than triumph. The revo- though humble circumstances; and, in childhood, lution of 1830 was to M. Royer Collard a solemn his mother had mentally devoted him to the event, in which he recognized the victorious Church, though, losing her when still very young, consummation of forty years of sacrifices and the hand-loom became his occupation. The fulabors endured by the country Royer Collard ture wanderer and watcher in the forests and sahad his share in a victory which his profound vannahs of America, heartily detested this sedenmind had foreseen. He continued to sit in the tary employment, and, as one more agreeable, or Chamber, and took a conscientious oath to the less distasteful, while still a lad, Wilson became new dynasty, and to the resolution of which the a pedlar, or hawker of muslins and other l'aisley address of the 221 had formed the glorious stand-goods. He also published a volume of his early ard. If the infirmities of age rarely then allowed poems, and made an opportunity of vending the his appearance at the tribune, he continued not wares of his fancy's loom along with his more mathe less devoted to his principles; he manifested terial tissues. The history of his adventures, them upon all important occasions. We need not while roaming with his pack, is interesting from recal to mind any stronger proof than the words the character of the youth, and not without inpronounced by him with such eloquent emotion struction, especially to those in his own station in over the tomb of Casimer Perrier. Worthy as he life possessed by the same turbulent spirit of inwas of esteem and admiration in the labors of his tellectual activity. Poverty was his great enemy; public life, he was in his intimate and private re- but it must not be forgotten, that this poverty was, lations not less generous, simple, and good. He in a great, measure, the consequence of unsettled possessed all the domestic virtues, and experi- habits, or, at least, any thing like steady perseverenced their joys and sorrows. Providence, which ing industry. Wilson was, however, among those did not stint him in years, did not always spare strong-minded men who, when time is given them, him afflictions. He supported them with the are certain to redeem themselves from the confirmness of a sage-with the faith of a Christian. sequences of the errors of their early training and Latterly he felt the presentiment-rather say the unfortunate circumstances. While still young, conviction of his approaching end. Within less and a hot democrat, he emigrated to the United than a month ago he spoke of it to, M. Guizot States of America, where, after a few years spent with the calmness and resolution that character-in desultory employments, he settled as a schoolized him ever. It was a last adieu! Religion, which he always loved and respected, and for whose cause he often combated, did not fail him at his last hour. Sinking in the arms of his revered wife, his dying thoughts were occupied with objects of beneficence and of charity, God received him thus. Noble and gentle end of an existence consecrated entirely to goodness, reason, and duty, the memory of which will ever remain dear to the country, and its examples and lessons be received by youthful generations destined to live in better and less tried times with respect and sympathy that cannot be exaggerated."-Examiner.

master, in which capacity he was much esteemed. That love of nature which marks the poet, and which had gained strength in his wanderings in Scotland as a pedlar, became at length his ruling passion. He was an enthusiastic naturalist, and his poetic genius carried him into the wilderness to gratify his own longing inborn desires. Wilson thus became the most eminent Ornithologist which the New World has produced; and no man has ever encountered the same hardships, or has had the same enjoyment in the pursuit of this branch of science, as the quondam Weaver and Packman. His descriptions of birds, and of his solitary wanderings in search of them, and his watchings of their habits, are his finest poems.

The poems, the early history, and the subsequent adventures of this remarkable man, with selections from his prose writings, form, we need hardly say, a delightful Miscellany-a book that ought to be popular, and which will be so. The work has higher claims than those of its author's Scottish poetry, thongh that is, if not of the highest, yet of a high order. As a specimen of his

verse in his earlier years, and as an indication of SELECT LIST OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS. that love of nature, and power of describing the common objects it exhibits to the searching or contemplative eye of genius, for which Wilson became pre-eminent, we select a few stanzas from his juvenile poem.